A Smartphone Debut at the Louvre
Automobili Lamborghini and Chinese smartphone maker OPPO chose the Louvre in Paris to announce a global strategic partnership and unveil its first product: the OPPO Find X Automobili Lamborghini Special Edition. Stefano Domenicali, then Lamborghini’s Chairman and CEO, stood alongside OPPO CEO Tony Chen to present a co-branded smartphone priced at €1,699, roughly €700 more than the standard Find X. The phone went on sale in Paris in August 2018.
The venue mattered as much as the product. Lamborghini did not stage this at a mobile trade show or a tech conference. Placing a smartphone launch inside one of the world’s most recognizable cultural institutions was a deliberate signal: Sant’Agata Bolognese wanted this read as a luxury event, not a consumer electronics announcement. For a brand whose core customers spend six figures on a car they might drive twice a month, the context needed to feel appropriately rarefied. That instinct to control the framing, to insist that even a phone carrying the raging bull be presented on Lamborghini’s terms rather than the tech industry’s, reveals the real story behind this partnership.
Why OPPO, and Why a Phone at All
Lamborghini described OPPO as its choice for a first exclusive smartphone partnership, and the word “first” carried weight. The collaboration was framed as covering “a broad range of areas,” with both companies committing to co-branded smartphones and related products going forward. This was not a one-off licensing deal where a logo gets applied to someone else’s hardware. Domenicali cited OPPO’s technology capability and design credentials, positioning the arrangement as a genuine strategic relationship.
The logic becomes clearer when measured against what competitors were already doing. Huawei had previously released a Porsche-branded Mate RS smartphone with 512GB of storage and an in-display fingerprint sensor. Porsche Design, of course, operates as a standalone luxury goods brand with decades of history in watches, luggage, and electronics. Lamborghini lacked that kind of established lifestyle sub-brand, which made the OPPO partnership a faster route into the same territory. Rather than building a consumer products division from scratch, Lamborghini could borrow OPPO’s manufacturing scale and mobile expertise while contributing design language and brand equity.
The risk, naturally, is dilution. Lamborghini builds roughly 10,000 cars a year and guards its exclusivity carefully. A smartphone, even an expensive one, is a mass-market object by comparison. Whether this kind of partnership enhances the brand by reaching aspirational buyers, or chips away at its mystique by putting the shield logo in too many pockets, depends entirely on execution. The Louvre launch was Lamborghini’s way of answering that question before anyone asked it: even when the product is a phone, the presentation stays unmistakably supercar.
Carbon Fiber, Gold Accents, and 35 Minutes to Full Charge
Execution, in this case, meant borrowing from Lamborghini’s material vocabulary in ways that go beyond cosmetic branding. A carbon fiber texture sits beneath the cover glass, and the Automobili Lamborghini logo shield is engraved on the body using a technique that creates a suspended three-dimensional effect visible from any angle. Packaging and accessories follow the signature orange and black color scheme associated with Lamborghini’s super sports cars: a black 50-watt SuperVOOC charger with a golden Lamborghini logo, OPPO O-Free wireless earbuds with gold accents, a braided USB cable, a slip-on back cover, and a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter, all presented in a specially designed box with a fine-patterned weave.
The headline engineering feature is OPPO’s SuperVOOC flash charge technology, which Lamborghini says debuted in a smartphone with this edition. Delivering 50 watts of charging power, it fills the 3,400mAh battery in 35 minutes. In 2018, that speed was genuinely remarkable, and the parallel to Lamborghini’s core brand promise of speed was obvious enough that neither company needed to oversell it.
Beyond the branding and the charger, the Lamborghini Edition largely shares its technical architecture with the standard Find X. The 6.42-inch FHD+ OLED display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, 8GB of RAM, and motorized pop-up camera slider housing a 16MP plus 20MP rear setup and a 25MP front sensor are all carried over. The Lamborghini edition does get 512GB of internal storage, double the standard model’s capacity, along with 3D facial recognition using 15,000 dots to map a face, comparable to the iPhone X’s FaceID system at the time.
For anyone considering this as a collector’s piece rather than a daily driver phone, the honest assessment is straightforward: the premium bought the SuperVOOC charger, the carbon fiber treatment, the accessories bundle, and the exclusivity of the branding. The core smartphone experience was identical to the standard Find X. That transparency actually reinforced the luxury positioning. Lamborghini was not pretending to be a phone manufacturer. It was selling an experience wrapped around someone else’s excellent hardware.
The OPPO smartphone features a sleek black design with a carbon fiber texture and a prominent gold Lamborghini logo. Image: Automobili Lamborghini.
Lamborghini’s Broader Play in Lifestyle Luxury
The OPPO partnership did not exist in isolation, and its sequel confirmed the template. Lamborghini followed the original phone with the Find X2 Pro Automobili Lamborghini Edition in 2020, which incorporated hot-forged glass, a four-layer carbon fiber texture, and the matte bronze color of the Aventador SVJ Roadster. The fact that the relationship produced a second chapter suggests it performed well enough commercially to justify continuation, though Lamborghini has never disclosed production numbers for either edition.
The brand’s lifestyle ambitions have since expanded well beyond pocket-sized devices. As Car and Driver reported, Lamborghini lent its design language to a 101-foot luxury yacht with Tecnomar, featuring 7,800 horsepower across three diesel motors and cabin design inspired by the Fenomeno. From smartphones to superyachts, the pattern holds: Lamborghini licenses its design DNA and brand identity to partners with domain expertise, rather than trying to manufacture consumer goods in-house.
That consistency is the thread connecting the Louvre stage to the Tecnomar hull. In a market where Ferrari operates its own fashion line and Porsche Design sells everything from sunglasses to kitchen appliances, Lamborghini’s strategy leans on fewer, more targeted partnerships rather than a sprawling merchandise empire. Whether that restraint serves the brand better in the long run remains an open question, but the OPPO partnership established the approach Sant’Agata Bolognese continues to follow: choose the right collaborator, insist on the right setting, and never let the product upstage the brand.
